OK, so i finally had my first session 'in anger' so to speak and i thought i'd post a few observations about how the rules work.
So, our session was mainly foot-bound and investigation/interaction based so we didn't touch the vehicle rules and only barely touched the combat rules so i'll leave those alone.
Skills
The way these work now is really good - much more flexible. Rather than 'i'm going to use X skill', we found ourselves thinking first 'what are you trying to do', and then determining 'which skill + stat meets that best'?
It was nicely intuitive, although we did struggle to find a match for something one of the PCs was trying to do - use his Inquisitorial authority to order an Imperial Guard commander to call off an attack...what skill would that be? We settled on Command (Terrify), but that didn't seem right somehow...
Skill resolution can take a bit time to work out as there are lots of nested modifiers, and we used 'Inspire' a lot; but once we got the hang of things it ticked along pretty well. Our GM resorted to 'describing' the task (this is a difficult test) to determine which modifier would be appropriate.
The DoS mechanic worked pretty well, although it seemed almost impossible to get less than 2 DoS.
Influence
Now then, this was VERY interesting. The fact that your influence goes up and down in accordance with success, and in response to your character's actions made for an excellent mechanic. Influence has a LOT of potential as a game mechanic and was perhaps the second most interesting rule section we played through...the first being...
Subtlety
Hooboy is this good. We played a team that were taking a subtle 'infiltration' approach and so we were trying to stay 'under the radar' as much as possible. However as the investigation progressed and we needed more and more to 'come out of the shadows' the investigation got harder as people began t hear about us and their reactions changed, Eventually we were forced to come out in the open and start to act rather than ask.
The interplay between influence, the PCs actions, skill use, investigations and the effects on subtlety make for a really powerful part of the game. Very very good.
Overall, we're really liking DH2b.
Next session may well involved a fair bit of combat so i'm looking forwards to testing those rules out...